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Author Topic: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace  (Read 6677 times)

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faust

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Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« on: September 12, 2016, 02:07:32 pm »
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Trust me, your palace would be a lot more magnificent if you replaced those golden statue by copper!

In the right deck, all (very) basic treasures get 1 VP. Which is, you know, nice, but not great. The maximum you could possibly reach with this is 90 VP if you get all 30 Golds. Not very impressive compared to what some alt-VP cards can do. Palace will never be your main source of VP.

It also has the problem that most decks that you flood with Treasures you only flood with one type. Think Trader, Masterpiece, Raid, Tunnel, Market Square, Hoard. Okay, you already have 7 Coppers. The main thing that happens in such treasure floods is that whichever treasure you don't spam basically becomes worth 3 VP, which is nice, and obviously better in Gold floods.

In a more standard BM, you can probably expect to get around 9 VP from this (3 Golds seems like a usual amount), which does give the BM player a slight edge, but a good engine often wins by more points.

Which cards do you think work well with this? Explorer is the only one I can think of that somewhat reliably gains both Silver and Gold, and well that's not the best combo ever.
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ThetaSigma12

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #1 on: September 12, 2016, 02:11:09 pm »
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Which cards do you think work well with this? Explorer is the only one I can think of that somewhat reliably gains both Silver and Gold, and well that's not the best combo ever.
Hero and mint can gain any treasure.
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singletee

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #2 on: September 12, 2016, 03:02:00 pm »
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Which cards do you think work well with this? Explorer is the only one I can think of that somewhat reliably gains both Silver and Gold, and well that's not the best combo ever.
Hero and mint can gain any treasure.

So can Mine and his little bro Taxman. (Technically, they can even gain Philosopher's Stones and Fortunes, just not usefully.)

Pilgrimage could also work but is probably better used some other way.
« Last Edit: September 12, 2016, 03:03:26 pm by singletee »
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luser

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #3 on: September 12, 2016, 04:03:31 pm »
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You got analysis incorrect, In  moneyish decks main limitation is silver so silver flooder definitely helps. Depending on number of silvers gold becomes better than duchy so bm will likely match all silvers with golds if game descends into duchy/gold dancing phase. With palace/jack you could just keep alternating between gold/province. Best combo here is treasure trove+jack. BM with TT alone is quite strong and causes situation where you have 6 but will buy a silver to get duchy points.
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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #4 on: September 12, 2016, 04:18:14 pm »
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This is one of my favorite Landmarks, as it encourages you to play in a novel way and to track your deck. It's not a ton of VP, so you wouldn't necessarily do this if your deck wasn't going to have any Treasures in it, but if you have treasure economy or limited trashing at all it's fun to figure out how to juggle all this coin in your deck.
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trivialknot

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #5 on: September 12, 2016, 05:50:33 pm »
+1

In my opinion/experience, Palace is one of the weaker landmarks.  I will pick up Palace points opportunistically, buying the limiting Treasure card instead of a Duchy, but it's not worth it to take any major detours for it.

Reasons: Copper/silver/gold costs much more than a Duchy, while also taking up more space in your deck.  The advantage of copper/silver/gold over Duchy is that the payoff helps build your deck.  But in a basic-money-dense deck, your goal is usually one Province per turn.  And if you're getting only one province per turn, you'd rather end the game early than muck around with Palace.
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faust

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #6 on: September 12, 2016, 06:42:40 pm »
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In my opinion/experience, Palace is one of the weaker landmarks.  I will pick up Palace points opportunistically, buying the limiting Treasure card instead of a Duchy, but it's not worth it to take any major detours for it.

Reasons: Copper/silver/gold costs much more than a Duchy, while also taking up more space in your deck.  The advantage of copper/silver/gold over Duchy is that the payoff helps build your deck.  But in a basic-money-dense deck, your goal is usually one Province per turn.  And if you're getting only one province per turn, you'd rather end the game early than muck around with Palace.

Yeah; what you'd need is a Big Money deck with multiple +buys, and those aren't too common.
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Aleimon Thimble

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #7 on: September 13, 2016, 06:05:04 am »
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I guess it can be worth it to have 2 or 3 sets of C-S-G as payload in an engine, to get just a couple of extra points.
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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #8 on: September 13, 2016, 07:59:40 am »
+1

In my opinion/experience, Palace is one of the weaker landmarks.  I will pick up Palace points opportunistically, buying the limiting Treasure card instead of a Duchy, but it's not worth it to take any major detours for it.

Reasons: Copper/silver/gold costs much more than a Duchy, while also taking up more space in your deck.  The advantage of copper/silver/gold over Duchy is that the payoff helps build your deck.  But in a basic-money-dense deck, your goal is usually one Province per turn.  And if you're getting only one province per turn, you'd rather end the game early than muck around with Palace.

Yeah; what you'd need is a Big Money deck with multiple +buys, and those aren't too common.

A nontrivial number of BM decks have this, like Council Room and Margrave and the like. Or consider things like Silver Gainer BM - in those games, Gold and Duchy can be worth the same number of points.
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jomini

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #9 on: September 13, 2016, 10:03:11 pm »
+3

There are a few other enablers out there:

Haggler is very nice as you can hit both Gold and Silver off a single buy for just a $1 more than a duchy. Silver/Copper is possible in a high Gold deck as well.
Stone mason lets you trash things (like late game golds or potentially even provinces) to get 2 out of 3 cards for a set.
Pilgrimage can be a quick 3 VP, particularly if you can otherwise flip the token.
Transmogrify can hunt for 3 VP late game with less loss of buying power (e.g. Transmog a Transmog into a Silver or copper) other scaling gainers (e.g. Artificer, Remodel, etc.) can pretty easily fill out the set.
Hop also can gain the trifecta as long as you can keep drawing. This may be a viable option to make up for a busted Hop mega-turn. In similar fashion, Duplicate can be handy for efficiency racking up multiple sets (you can almost think of Duplicate as a mini-DLands that you activate on your final turn).
You can also score very large numbers of Palace points off cost reduction. 6 Bridges is a free province worth of points, and of course it gets better if your draw or village have +buys, too. This can get crazy large if you can hit up enough cost reduction and +buys to pile some serious triples (e.g. Peasant/Bridge troll/draw/Palace). Likewise, you absolutely can empty the golds with something like Princess/Talisman/Palace/draw. Drawing 12 stop cards and using one terminal can enable you to hit 33 VP on one pass. Going straight for the money option is likely worth it using cost reduction, draw, and Talisman. Talisman is often good at building up draw and rapidly scales (1 -> 3 -> 7 -> 10 -> crazy points).



In general though let's say that Silver and Copper would otherwise not be in your engine at all. Okay, so when do you want to grab them for VP? Say the golds are space efficient enough on their own to have. Okay so Silver & Copper take up two slots for 3 VP. That is the same VP/$ as Harem. VP/card is lower at 3/2 instead of 2/1. And the VP/cost is better at 3/3 (though it does take a +buy). If you have the spare buy and are just looking at space/cash production efficiency, then you should go for Palace pretty close to the thresholds where you would want Harem near the end game.

However, if you can keep your engine working and have plenty of +buys, then for a small drop in space efficiency you can maximize gold & silver (3 each for a standard engine build out, save a copper) and you can just spike points with copper buys; carrying around an extra card is often not that much harder on the engine and for easy pickings at 9 VP late game that is well worth it. Pretty much in every Palace game I would aim for 1/3/3 instead of 0/1/5 for my treasures if only to have the option of scoring 2 VP off a busted hand.

Masterpiece and Trader also allow for some very fun decisions about when to tank your deck along this line - you can spike, easily, 15 VP on your final turn.


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faust

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #10 on: September 14, 2016, 03:43:26 am »
+1

6 Bridges is a free province worth of points

Or 6 Bridges is, you know, 3 actual Provinces.
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jomini

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #11 on: September 14, 2016, 06:58:25 am »
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6 Bridges is a free province worth of points

Or 6 Bridges is, you know, 3 actual Provinces.

You don't say? And here I thought it was 3 Provinces and 3 Duchies which is even more points.

You will note that I did not say it was two free provinces worth of points, though that is an option, precisely because I assumed you would want all the provinces you can afford.

The point is, that because you are looking at your VP being spread over mutliple cards, the premium for cost reduction is larger. Likewise, once you hit some critical mass of cost reduction, you become +buy limited and on a lot of cost-reduction boards that means you really can score more VP with treasures than with Provinces. E.g. 5 Hwy is around the critical point for making golds +buy limited rather than $ limited; thus a setup of Hwy/Kc/+buy is pretty easy to get to more VP in a turn from treasure than are in the province pile. Getting to the critical point for provinces is around 7 Hwy and that is far more difficult if the pile is remotely contested.

And that is what will make the rare Palace game totally warped - when the marginal value of +buy starts to beat out the marginal value of $. That is when you can Palace for the big stuff.
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trivialknot

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #12 on: September 14, 2016, 11:48:42 am »
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6 Bridges is a free province worth of points

Or 6 Bridges is, you know, 3 actual Provinces.

You don't say? And here I thought it was 3 Provinces and 3 Duchies which is even more points.

You will note that I did not say it was two free provinces worth of points, though that is an option, precisely because I assumed you would want all the provinces you can afford.

The point is, that because you are looking at your VP being spread over mutliple cards, the premium for cost reduction is larger. Likewise, once you hit some critical mass of cost reduction, you become +buy limited and on a lot of cost-reduction boards that means you really can score more VP with treasures than with Provinces. E.g. 5 Hwy is around the critical point for making golds +buy limited rather than $ limited; thus a setup of Hwy/Kc/+buy is pretty easy to get to more VP in a turn from treasure than are in the province pile. Getting to the critical point for provinces is around 7 Hwy and that is far more difficult if the pile is remotely contested.

And that is what will make the rare Palace game totally warped - when the marginal value of +buy starts to beat out the marginal value of $. That is when you can Palace for the big stuff.
This seems backwards.  If you're buy-limited, copper/silver/gold is expensive because that's 3 buys!  It's also 3 stop cards, which is a big deal if you're building a thin engine that can play 5 highways consistently.  Finally, it doesn't do a thing to end the game, which is extremely important in a megaturn mirror game.  Are you saying this actually happened in a game you played, and that it was the best move?
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Chris is me

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #13 on: September 14, 2016, 11:54:48 am »
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I think we can all agree that 1 VP per stop card is not generally the best scoring method for an engine. We need to stop considering this from the engine paradigm to see when it has the most value.
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faust

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #14 on: September 14, 2016, 12:08:43 pm »
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a setup of Hwy/Kc/+buy is pretty easy to get to more VP in a turn from treasure than are in the province pile.

Err... I debate that claim? That would be 48 Buys. 41 if you're generous and assume you still have your starting Coppers. KC'ing all Market Squares leaves you with 31 buys.
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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #15 on: September 14, 2016, 03:14:13 pm »
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a setup of Hwy/Kc/+buy is pretty easy to get to more VP in a turn from treasure than are in the province pile.

Err... I debate that claim? That would be 48 Buys. 41 if you're generous and assume you still have your starting Coppers. KC'ing all Market Squares leaves you with 31 buys.
If the province is down to 0 it is very easy.
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jomini

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #16 on: September 14, 2016, 03:39:47 pm »
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a setup of Hwy/Kc/+buy is pretty easy to get to more VP in a turn from treasure than are in the province pile.

Err... I debate that claim? That would be 48 Buys. 41 if you're generous and assume you still have your starting Coppers. KC'ing all Market Squares leaves you with 31 buys.
Yes, you can either Kc eleven/twelve +buy cards or do any of several really easy things with more specific cards (e.g. Squire, Haggler, Talisman, Beggar, etc.). Assuming your opponent goes off early and tanks on green (e.g. something like buying 4 Provinces, 8 Duchies) you can then overbuild if there are enough +buy. With Kc even a lot of the really crappy +buy count, but two piles with +buy is not exactly uncommon.

6 Bridges is a free province worth of points

Or 6 Bridges is, you know, 3 actual Provinces.

You don't say? And here I thought it was 3 Provinces and 3 Duchies which is even more points.

You will note that I did not say it was two free provinces worth of points, though that is an option, precisely because I assumed you would want all the provinces you can afford.

The point is, that because you are looking at your VP being spread over mutliple cards, the premium for cost reduction is larger. Likewise, once you hit some critical mass of cost reduction, you become +buy limited and on a lot of cost-reduction boards that means you really can score more VP with treasures than with Provinces. E.g. 5 Hwy is around the critical point for making golds +buy limited rather than $ limited; thus a setup of Hwy/Kc/+buy is pretty easy to get to more VP in a turn from treasure than are in the province pile. Getting to the critical point for provinces is around 7 Hwy and that is far more difficult if the pile is remotely contested.

And that is what will make the rare Palace game totally warped - when the marginal value of +buy starts to beat out the marginal value of $. That is when you can Palace for the big stuff.
This seems backwards.  If you're buy-limited, copper/silver/gold is expensive because that's 3 buys!  It's also 3 stop cards, which is a big deal if you're building a thin engine that can play 5 highways consistently.  Finally, it doesn't do a thing to end the game, which is extremely important in a megaturn mirror game.  Are you saying this actually happened in a game you played, and that it was the best move?

If you are buy limited on both, then of course, go for provinces unless that is an auto-loss. The point is that is easier to become buy limited on gold via cost reduction and that buys are, generally, easier to spam in Dominion than cash. Getting enough buys to run straight out for Palace points does take a nice setup, but it is not too bad.

For instance Btroll/Talisman/draw can set you up for 48 VP, anything else that let's you get bonus +buy (like a Ruined market) can let you hit 60 VP. Even a single province + Palace VP is enough to win the megaturn war.

Getting to that sort of +buy count is not common in the least, but for a few setups (e.g. Kc & double +buys) can be doable. And the upper bound of 90 VP is enough that you can let your opponent grab almost all the provinces and all the duchies while you build.

The more common effect is that when you are spamming cantrips or village/X with your cost reduction, you can setup for a respectable number of points (a province every 6 buys) which lets you build for longer - if the other guy goes off too soon you can just build, vacuum up the leftover green, and then punch out with Palace points. Getting to 50%+1 VP is no longer the benchmark for cost-reduction megaturns, it is far to easy to supplement with Palace points to gain 4 Provinces, 6 Duchies, and call it a day.
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trivialknot

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #17 on: September 14, 2016, 05:15:54 pm »
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Ok, so you are thinking of a situation where the opponent went big money and picked up most of the provinces before your kc/highway engine kicked off.  Now, the difficulty is imagining kc/highway board where bm is so competitive that Palace is the only thing giving you the edge?
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jomini

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Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Palace
« Reply #18 on: September 14, 2016, 07:55:54 pm »
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No, I am thinking of a Kc/Hwy board where the other guy grabbed something like 4 Provinces and 6 Duchies using 3 +buy cards and now has a deck that is almost majority green and not able to put together province turns easily. Say something like Kc/Hwy/Pawn.

And I am thinking of a board with something like Kc/Squire/Hwy or Kc/Haggler/Hwy/+buy or Kc/Hwy/Beggar/+buy ... for a lot of megaturn mirrors your normal goal is to buil to 50% +1 of the VP. Given the unlimited nature of Palace points you may be able to let the other guy grab as many as 6 provinces and still win just by building up more buys.

« Last Edit: September 14, 2016, 09:08:16 pm by jomini »
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